Solar Energy News

Denver, the Mile High City, will be inundated with an international audience of renewable energy experts next week as the World Renewable Energy Forum (WREF) gets into full swing. It’s a behemoth of an event with roughly 200 sessions, including Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Mohamed El-Ashry a senior fellow with the UN Foundation.

The World Renewable Energy Congress holds the event every other year. But this is also the first time that the American Solar Energy Society’s (ASES’s) National Solar Conference will be held at the same time. “What that means is we’re bringing in people from all around the world this time, in particular from developing nations,” Chuck Kutscher, PhD, Principal Engineer and Group Manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and event organizer, said during a recent interview with Comcast newsmakers.

It’s the second time ASES has held its event in Denver, the city previously hosted the conference in 2006. But by coinciding with the WREF it will bring a larger, more diverse audience to the event. “Developing nations are a huge market for renewable energy. So I think it’s going to be a very interesting conference. It’s going to be much broader in scope than we typically see at the national solar conference,” Kutscher said.

So while the ASES conference would focus on the U.S. market and how to address it’s solar market and industry, the WREF will include that, but also the international perspective. “We’re covering renewable from small-scale village power all the way up to very large power plants,” Kutscher said. There will also be a special track for women in renewable energy.

There will also be a focus on research, after all the National Renewable Energy Research Lab is just about 10 miles down the road. The lab is a major sponsor and there will be discussions of solar, climate change, building energy efficiency, heating and cooling, with renewables.

The conference is being held at Colorado Convention Center May 13 to May 17. In addition to the sessions the conference will feature a showroom where exhibitors can show off their latest and greatest innovations.